Edited by David Rodin and Henry Shue

Just and Unjust Warriors

The Moral and Legal Status of Soldiers

Edited by David Rodin and Henry Shue

Description

Can a soldier be held responsible for fighting in a war that is illegal or unjust? This is the question at the heart of a new debate that has the potential to profoundly change our understanding of the moral and legal status of warriors, wars, and indeed of moral agency itself. The debate pits a widely shared and legally entrenched principle of war - that combatants have equal rights and equal responsibilities irrespective of whether they are fighting in a war that just or unjust - against a set of striking new arguments. These arguments challenge the idea that there is a separation between the rules governing the justice of going to war (the jus ad bellum) and the rules governing what combatants can do in war (the jus in bello). If ad bellum and in bello rules are connected in the way these new arguments suggest, then many aspects of just war theory and laws of war would have to be rethought and perhaps reformed.

This book contains eleven original and closely argued essays by leading figures in the ethics and laws of war and provides an authoritative treatment of this important new debate. The essays both challenge and defend many deeply held convictions: about the liability of soldiers for crimes of aggression, about the nature and justifiability of terrorism, about the relationship between law and morality, the relationship between soldiers and states, and the relationship between the ethics of war and the ethics of ordinary life.

This book is a project of the Oxford Leverhulme Programme on the Changing Character of War.

Just and Unjust Warriors

The Moral and Legal Status of Soldiers

Edited by David Rodin and Henry Shue

Table of Contents

1: Introduction, David Rodin and Henry Shue 2: The Morality of War and the Law of War, Jeff McMahan 3: The Moral Inequality of Soldiers: Why Jus in Bello Asymmetry is Half Right, David Rodin 4: Fearful Symmetry, Christopher Kutz 5: Do We Need a "Morality of War"?, Henry Shue 6: How to Judge Soldiers Whose Cause in Unjust, Judith Lichtenberg 7: Moral equality, victimhood and the sovereignty symmetry problem, Cheyney Ryan 8: The Status of Combatants, Tony Coady 9: Is the Independent Application of Jus in Bello the way to Limit War?, Anthony Coates 10: Just War and Regular War: Competing Paradigms, Gregory Reichberg 11: A Presumption of the Moral Equality of Combatants: a Citizen Soldier' Perspective, Dan Zupan 12: The Principle of Equal Application of the Laws of War, Adam Roberts

Just and Unjust Warriors

The Moral and Legal Status of Soldiers

Edited by David Rodin and Henry Shue

Author Information

Edited by David Rodin, Research Fellow in Philosophy, Oxford Leverhulme Programme on the Changing Character of War, and Henry Shue, Senior Research Fellow Emeritus, Merton College, Oxford

Contributors:

David Rodin, University of Oxford Henry Shue, University of Oxford Jeff McMahan, Rutgers University Christopher Kutz, UC BerkeleyJudith Lichtenberg, Georgetown University Cheyney Ryan, University of Oregon Tony Coady, University of Melbourne Anthony Coates, University of Reading Gregory Reichberg, International Peace Research Institute, Oslo Dan Zupan, formerly at the United States Military AcademyAdam Roberts, University of Oxford

Just and Unjust Warriors

The Moral and Legal Status of Soldiers

Edited by David Rodin and Henry Shue

Reviews and Awards

"This volume is excellent. It is comprehensive and informative. Just and Unjust Warriors mostly delivers on its promise of tightly argued chapters that respond to each other. It gives us more to think about and is accessible to a wide audience. Even though it will be more interesting to those readers with some background in just war theory, it is also recommended for those who want simply to think seriously about the moral rules applicable to war." - Steve Viner, Intrnational Affairs

"The quality of the contributions in Just and Unjust Warriors is universally high, and, unlike most edited volumes, in which the individual chapters stand more or less in isolation, in this instance there is continuous cross-referencing between the authors. This produces a volume that is unusually coherent and focussed for an edited work, a fact for which Rodin and Shue deserve congratulation." - Journal of Applied Philosophy

"this volume provides essential interdisciplinary consideration of the whole range of questions raised by the novel threats and challenges posed to the international system by nonstate actors bent on mass attacks and/or threatening strikes of weapons of mass destruction. Its combination of historical perspective and philosophical theory, and its examination of the international system and of various policy options, makes it a deeply informed contribution to a very important contemporary debate." - Martin Cook, Ethics & International Affairs